Porn to order … pornography is now readily available, thanks to the internet. Photograph: Alamy

Porn Studies needs your contributions. The Routledge academic periodical will debut next spring, and a call for papers appeared this week soliciting submissions for "the first dedicated, international, peer-reviewed journal to critically explore those cultural products and services designated as pornographic". Two dons, Feona Attwood and Clarissa Smith, are the editors.

The timing suggests the EL James phenomenon may have provided the impetus for the launch by making erotica ubiquitous; but literary porn is only one of the interests of the top-shelf journal, which is open to offerings from sociologists, criminologists, technologists and experts in cultural, media and gender studies.

Forty years on, Porn Studies (bound to be shortened by students to Porn Studs) will enter a not dissimilar cultural landscape, with renewed feminist anger coinciding with porn once again often becoming headline news; this time not as a result of censorship receding, but due to the internet making it readily available.

Its editors, though, evidently won't be inhibited by 70s ambivalence; Smith signalled their Carterian approach last week by proposing the motion "pornography is good for us" in an Intelligence Squared debate, with Germaine Greer among those opposing it. Their periodical is bound to shake up academic life from the outset, giving an automatic get-out ("I'm researching/peer-reviewing an article") to anyone caught viewing dodgy material on their laptop; and once the dedicated journal becomes established, surely a dedicated porn department somewhere must follow?

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With pornography accounting for huge volumes of internet traffic, it's a subject ripe for analysis. But a new journal, Porn Studies, is causing outrage among campaigners against hardcore porn, writes Carole Cadwalladr